“Somebody is coming!”
They crouched low as they saw a bobbing light coming down the path toward them. It was a man with a lantern and as he drew nearer they saw that it was a short man, whom Jim recognized as the man who had talked with Gates. Near the wall the man halted, and placed a wooden box on the ground. Setting the lantern down, and without looking around him, he dropped a pick and shovel from his shoulder. He took up the pick, raised it above his head and brought it down with a thump on the hard earth.
The boys, when talking the situation over at school, were agreed that Gates had received his idea from the newspaper account of the burying of the silver plate by the Gannon family. When they saw the wooden box on the ground they were firmly convinced that it held the disputed silver cup, for it was just the right size.
The digger in the garden worked steadily at his task, breaking the stiff earth with his pick and then shovelling it away with his shovel. He had made a hole perhaps three feet deep when something wholly unexpected happened.
There was a sudden flash of fire back of the watching cadets and they were bathed in an embarrassing glow of light. Turning startled heads over their shoulders they saw that a garage nearby had caught fire and that a pan of oil was blazing up to the sky. The man working in the garden looked up with a grunt of fright, but fortunately not in their immediate direction, for the glare was spreading and he looked slightly to one side of them. Seeing how things stood the three cadets dropped from the wall swiftly and with as little noise as possible, crouching at the bottom of the wall outside Gates’ property. The glare died down abruptly.
“Did he see us?” questioned Don, eagerly.
“No,” whispered Jim. “But that was a narrow escape.”
“You bet,” agreed Terry. “There we were, sitting on the wall like three chickens! That was a lucky escape.”
“We had better wait here until he finishes his digging,” Jim suggested. “Listen; he has gone back to work.”
They could hear the man resume his digging. But it was unfortunate that they could not see into the garden, for real trouble was coming their way rapidly.